Gamer’s Poor Attittude

In this post I would like to talk about the way that gamers act like complete megalomaniacs. To do this I’d like to discuss a couple of posts that I have seen in recent months that most flagrantly involve this issue. Specifically I will be referencing Polygon’s Review of Dragon’s Crown, the controversy surrounding Cube World’s development, and a “controversial” 9/10 given to GTA V by Gamespot. I would like this post to be more of an analysis of why these things are happening rather than an angry rant as to how gamers should be less angry.

The first and maybe saddest example of this is reactions to a review of Dragon’s Crown given by Polygon’s Danielle Riendeau. In this review she gave the game a 6.5/10 because it over-sexualized women and used them for rewards. There was also some less than satisfactory gameplay mechanics within the game. There was a huge amount of backlash to this post as well as flagrant discussion about the topic of sexism in games, to the point where people were verbally attacking Danielle. So why did this happen? I think that it is a combination of few things. Firstly the fact that this review was attached to a low score. On top of it being a low score, it was a low score when most of the other reviews were relatively high. I think that if this review was posted as is without a number on the end of it, it wouldn’t have been as singled out or as controversial. In addition to this gamers have this weird thought in their head that reviews can only be. The fact is that everything is biased to some degree. You can’t remove your own viewpoints from what you write entirely, and I’m not sure if you should have to in a review. There isn’t anything wrong with providing different perspective on a topic. This same topic was then escalated with the release of GTA V. When Gamespot gave GTA V a “measly” 9/10 gamers began posting angry hate filled comments on the review. I think this situation is pretty well explained by this post on the daily dot. It is as if intelligent discussion is impossible on the internet. I think that one thing that definitely hurts internet discussion is the wall of anonymity between everyone. Things that are said on the internet would never be said in person. Yet another incident involving gamers and the internet happened more recently involving the developer of a game called Cube World. After his game exploded into popularity he didn’t release that much news and his fanbase raged at him, repeatedly calling him out for fraud and demanding refunds. Well he recently responded to all the accusations in the form of a response to Kotaku. It turns out that the fans fears were totally baseless and the game is still being worked on. This is due to yet another weird sentiment from gamers that if they paid for an unfinished product they deserve the full product.While this would be ideal I don’t think anyone should buy into an alpha or a kickstarter for that matter without the thought, “I may never see any return on this investment.” So what do all these events tell us? Gamers can be extremely vicious for almost no reason, but definitely not without some things leading to such behaviour.